


Wonderwall

by celli-inkblots (thebeespatella)



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Ableism, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Violence, triggering content
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-07-27
Updated: 2011-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-21 19:37:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/228974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebeespatella/pseuds/celli-inkblots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Surely, Erik thinks, it is illegal to play chess with so many other questions in the air, with so much tension spanning across a table."</p><p>When Emma Frost tears down a wall in Charles’ head in an attempt to defeat the X-men, a terrible, unbearable pain is unleashed upon both the X-men and the Brotherhood. Only Erik and Emma can’t feel it, with his helmet and her diamond form, but the others won’t survive for much longer without a cure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Ein

**Author's Note:**

> Based off of [ this prompt](http://1stclass-kink.livejournal.com/2292.html?thread=1537524#t1537524) at [ 1stclass-kink.](http://1stclass-kink.livejournal.com/)
> 
> So sorry - I seem completely unable to make them _happy_. Julienned vegetables and angst reduction sauce are still on the menu.

i.

It’s blindingly bright. The ground is soft sand, cool and light to his bare feet. There is a dark point on the horizon, perhaps the size of a distant satellite dish, eons and miles away, or a coin, ever too present.

“Where are we?” he asks.

“The edge,” Emma says. “You can’t stay in here with that on.”

She tugs at his helmet and he instinctively slaps her hand away. The diamond grazes his knuckle, and he stares at the pinpricks of blood for a moment. Then slowly, he places two hands on the side of his head – metal cool to the touch – and removes it.

A sudden wave rushes through him – a rippling bullet of air that _hurts_. It tears his mind apart, it pushes pain through every nerve - he can’t stand, can’t hear - can barely feel himself breathe, much less feel his legs –

Lying there defeated, slowly the world comes back into focus, and Emma is still diamond above him, holding the helmet. 

Slowly, he stands. “Take care of it,” he mutters, feeling naked.

“Walk towards the dark spot. I think that’s where the hole is.” She’s glittering in this strange white sunlight, flashing sharply with each movement.

“I’ll see you on the other side,” he says.

She says nothing, and is slowly swallowed up by the light. He begins to walk.

 

ii.

 

He walks, and he walks. The dark spot is like the dark side of the sun, ink seeping-saturating across the unreadable bright parchment of the sky. The bleached sand gives beneath his feet but he can’t see the ground.

As he walks, he is stripped. The cape is tugged away, melting into the whiteness, the gloves disappearing as a breeze touches him, pushes his hair back. Everything floats away into nothingness until he feels like nothingness himself – he doesn’t breathe, he doesn’t hear, he doesn’t feel. There is only the dark on the horizon.

He walks, and he walks.

 

iii.

 

When he reaches the edge of the darkness, he can still sense the shimmering white all around his body, behind him. With a last look at the wasteland of light, he steps into the dark.

 

 

iv.

 

It’s there again. That pain. Ripping each muscle apart fiber by fiber, needles separating each layer of skin from bone, each part of his eye is being dissected.

And then he can suddenly feel his body again, heavy with breath, unrelentingly trapping. His knees and hands are sinking into plush carpet, he is wearing clothes he hasn’t seen for a while. A black turtleneck, well-pressed slacks. His skin flickers amber with firelight. The walls of the room are covered with portraits, opulent chairs are strewn about. Suits of armor stand guard against doors that are thrown open.

In the middle of the room, on a low table, there is a chessboard.

Sixteen pawns. Four rooks, knights, bishops. Two queens, and two kings. Everything is missing except for a single black pawn. He picks it up, feels the smooth wooden carving – a rich texture from a richer textile; his cloth is poor now – and puts it in his pocket. It sits comfortably. The room is completely silent. Even the fire does not crackle, a silent tangle of burning. Slowly, he approaches the doors, steps out into the hallway.

He’s still barefoot, and his feet make no noise against the cold wooden floors. The walls have more portraits, eyes following him with history as he walks. There are endless winding hallways, doors tightly shut. Everything is covered in a dull flickering light, like the fire is following behind him from the first room. He walks slowly, listening for a noise that will not come.

Then, on his left – there is a strange tugging sensation, and he turns to face the door from which it comes. He is inexplicably drawn to the brass handle. It’s nondescript, no different from all the others, but he must, he must, he must go in. It’s imperative that he enter. He turns the handle.

 

 

v.

 

It’s a simple bedroom. Spare. Clean. Four o’clock sun is shining clearly. The bed is rather lower than the average bed, and there are curved grooves in the floor. There is nothing on the clothes hangers in the open closet, everything’s folded in a small cabinet by the sliding glass doors. A soft wind carries the muslin curtains – the first sound – a fluttering like the hiss of feathers as a bird takes frightened flight. He walks towards the doors. They open onto a balcony lined with potted plants. There is a corner where the vases and planters and bowls are broken, green sadly lying on its side, soil spilled all over. There is a black knight nestled in the dirt, and he picks it up, brushes it off, and it joins the pawn in his pocket.

The jagged pieces of porcelain are like shards of a feeling. He kneels next to them and his hand wavers – the gleam of the sunlight caught on the off-white, suddenly he can almost hear the crash, the slightest pinch of uneasiness in his mind. He stands, brushes the dirt off his trousers, and backs out of the room slowly. Everything is made of iron but nothing sings to him.  The door shuts behind him with a soft click, and he continues down the corridor.

 

vi.

 

When it next happens, he is ready. The compulsion to enter a room hits him a few more doors down. Click. The sweep of the door as it closes behind him, a soft echo, because he’s in a bathroom. All the tiles are dark blue. The light is chartreuse, a vinegared chardonnay, and everything is tinged with illness. If he were to speak, the thick air would swallow every sound.

It’s rather cramped, not only because a toilet is squished in with the narrowest tub he’s ever seen in the further half of the room, but also because the floor is littered with broken glass. The tiles glitter like crystal poppies in a field of dark blue grass, growing towards the sickness.

The mirror over the sink is shattered. His reflection is outlined with the black spaces and edged with the remnants of blood, cool silver streaked with black. Like a Jackson Pollock; it’s art. Like a moment of madness, it’s wild. The delicate cracks are almost fey in their winding, capturing an impulse with every split in the glass.  

There’s a cherry-red toothbrush, the translucent, striped bristles glowing garishly in the light. A bishop rests next to it, stark ebony against the veneer of the sink. He takes the bishop, and quietly, he exits this room as well. 

 

 

vii.

 

Urges continue to hit him. He suspects the walls don’t change, only the doors.

 

 

viii.

 

The next room is an assault on the senses – he reels with the smells and the sensations. Heat is rolling over his skin, the air reeks of sweat and sighs, exertion and exhalation. There is no light here except for a sliver of moonlight illuminating a thoroughly unmade bed. Clothes are strewn all over the room – he recognizes an old shirt of his own.

This room is different because he knows which room this is, he knows when this was – he closes his eyes against the imprints of the shadows in the coverlet. He walks around to the side of the bed, and sure enough, there it is – a thin metal rod bent to the most elaborate angles. There’s a rook wrapped in its glinting coils, and he carefully pulls it out, and puts it in his pocket.

He can see the vivid scene that had played out here. Charles’ legs wrapped around his waist. He can almost feel Charles’ breath in his ear, his fingertips on his mouth. The red marks on Charles’ wrists are before his eyes. Charles’ cries are ringing in his ears. He stretches a hand out to feel the dip in Charles’ spine, the smooth curve, but it’s not there.

 

 

ix.

 

He still has no idea where he is, or where Charles is meant to be in this entire mess. When Emma had told him the plan – go in, fix the hole in the wall in his mind - she hadn’t mentioned that he’d have to walk for millennia in a godforsaken desert and then walk through the labyrinth of Xavier mansion, looking into odd, lonely rooms where the air hangs in feeble splendor, like broken Christmas ornaments. She hadn’t told him how to fix this wall, or indeed what it would even look like. Would he need mortar? Bricks? Did Charles know he was here? Did he want Charles to know he was here? For all he knew, Charles could be in his mind as he was in his mind, in his mind.

 

This telepathy stuff was all awfully esoteric.

 

x.

 

There is crying in the following room. Quiet, stifled. As he pushes open the door, he sees it immediately – a small boy underneath the covers of an enormous bed. He pulls back the sheets to find that the boy’s body is wracked with sobs; that his soul is nearly shaking with his grief. Instinctively, he places a hand on the pajama-clad shoulder. “Shh,” he says, and is surprised by the rasp of his own voice. “What’s wrong?”

The boy turns to his touch like a freshwater fish delving into the ocean. “I – I – ” He’s taking staggering breaths, obviously attempting to control himself.

“Sometimes it’s better to let it out,” he says, thinking of his own forcedly stolid nights.

Conversely, this seems to calm the boy, and he fully opens his eyes, eyelashes fluttering with tears. Even tear-stained, pale and eight years old, he is unmistakable. “Charles?” he whispers.

The boy nods, leans further towards him. Tears are still falling heavily, and the occasional sob wrenches its way out of his throat. “I’m – I’m sorry, I’m just ” – his body shudders violently – “I can hear everyone, I can hear everything they think, but I – but – ”

“Shh…”

“ – I’m still so alone – ”

They sit like that for a while, Charles tucked into his arm, until it fades away, and he’s back in the hallway.

 

 

interlude.

 

Erik’s body stirs. “Is he awake?” Raven asks.

“No,” Emma replies. “Neither of them yet.”

“The pain is over.” Alex sits next to Charles’ body. “It ended about five minutes after he went in. Maybe that’s…?”

“We are not leaving Magneto in there forever,” Emma says sharply, and he shrugs, but says nothing.

“There has to be a way…” Hank is pacing on the far side of the room, and Raven watches him. “Miss Frost, is there no way you can repair the wall yourself?”

“He instinctively blocks me out. I tried.”

“And why Erik?” Hank asks. “Why not Raven, or anyone else?”

Emma looks at him then. “I think you know why, Beast.”

He lets out a rumble of discontent. “Do you know what’s behind the wall?”

“No.”

“So you just ripped open a wall in someone’s head with no idea as to the repercussions – ”

“We are at war.” She stands, tight-lipped, diamond sparkling at the edges of her skin. “There can be no mercy.”

Hank sits down next to Alex, feeling suddenly defeated. Both Charles and Erik are softly breathing, skin translucent and slack with the low light of the room, like frozen jellyfish. Both look haggard and drawn – the ages apart, he thinks, or perhaps the ages together. “That’s where all of you were always wrong,” he says. “We are not at war, especially not now, and not with each other. Right now, we’re trying to heal.”

 

 

xi.

 

When he reaches this door, he is suddenly filled with trepidation, because he knows this door. It is not indistinguishable from the others – yes, there’s the scar where he’d missed the lock with the key (satellite dish turning, powers shaking erratically with the promise of war), there’s the same click of the door tripping over itself to yield to him. He knows what he will see.

Two portraits flanking either side of the bed, two nightstands covered in various papers and trinkets, two hourglass-shaped lamps. Here too all the cabinets are opened, rifled through, and they’re all empty – there’s only one item left, and its tossed over the neatly made bed – the brown leather jacket he’d missed after leaving (an afterthought-distraction).  There’s a queen tucked into the sleeve, and he picks that up too. His briefcase is still standing next to his bed, perhaps forgotten.

The room is still whole although the all the fragments should be flying. So clean yet so saturated with memory, like a cracked dark pomegranate spilling juice over a white sheet, soaking yard by yard until he’s wrapped up in the deep garnet of the past. He has to place two fingers over his pulse to check that he is indeed still alive. His pulse is sluggish and staining. “Oh, Charles,” he murmurs to himself.

“Erik,” a voice answers from behind. “Fancy seeing you here.”

 

 

xii.

 

He whirls around to face the person – he already knows that it’s Charles, the inflection, the accent, how could it not – and then there he is. For the first time in a year, leaning casually against the door frame, solid as the chess pieces in his pocket.

Before he knows it, he’s crossed the room, stretched out a hand to Charles shoulder (warm, soft – home) and touched a hand to Charles’ cheek, and leaned in quickly. Their faces are so close – the space between them a fracture in bone. Erik can feel Charles’ trembling breath tickling his lips, an eyelash fluttering against his own cheekbone, the shift of muscles under both hands, jaw working, shoulder tensing, and he tries to brush it away, stroking Charles’ face with his thumb, moving his hand slowly to Charles’ neck. When Charles licks his lips, there is the softest brush of wet against Erik’s mouth.

Then he remembers. Who he is. What they are. He steps back two paces, withdrawing his hands quickly. “Where are we?” he asks, voice rough with disuse and anticipation.

Charles is no longer leaning against the doorframe. He is standing, eyes closed, hands in his pockets. Breathing deeply. There is suddenly a broken teapot at his feet – Erik can see the handle, there was no sound – and with a sweep of his arm he collects it all in a bag and it vanishes. “Where we are,” Charles says pensively. “That’s a difficult question to answer.”  

“Emma told me, when we were – ”

“Ah, yes. Emma. Emma Frost.” The sardonic smile has a blade Erik never thought he’d see, and suddenly he sees a needle sticking out of his own chest, thin, silvery in the late light. He frowns and throws it to the ground, but Charles’ voice still retains that steely quality. “I suppose we could say that we are in my mind.”

Erik allows himself a wry half-smile. “It fits that your mind looks like Xavier Mansion.”

“I organized it like this because it was easiest,” Charles says. “And it’s large enough to hold everything.”

 “Do other people’s minds look like buildings?” Erik cannot help his curiosity.

  “This is going to sound a bit like synesthesia.” Charles is standing, lecturing. In Erik’s room. Hands in pockets, wearing a crisp shirt. The garnet is fresh and wet with the tang of memory. “You know, mixing up the senses – when you smell sounds, for instance, can happen in accidents - but everyone’s mind looks like everything they’ve ever felt, tastes like everything they’ve ever heard – ” A light flush suffuses his cheeks. “Sorry, I…it’s a bit different for everyone.”

He cannot resist, greedy, gorging himself silly already on blue eyes and slight frame but needing to quench his thirst with voice: “And what does mine look like?”

 A pause. “I don’t know, Erik. Not anymore.”

 

 

xiii.

 

“Would you like to play chess?” Charles asks abruptly, gesturing vaguely.

“I – ” How many mistakes can you make in a split second decision; how many have you made already? “Of course.”

“I trust you found the pieces.” Charles sits, and suddenly his favorite chair is beneath him, Erik’s customary seat materializing out of thin air. A low table appears as well, and carefully Erik lays out the pieces from his pocket.

“Do you have the others?” he asks.

Charles waves a hand, and the remaining black pieces put into place. “I always had half your pieces, my friend.” The white pieces also appear, the pawn in the default position moved up in front of the king.

 

And with a smile – “Your move,” he says.

 

 

xiv.

 

Surely, Erik thinks, it is illegal to play chess with so many other questions in the air, with so much tension spanning across a table. An entire year since the beach, and Charles wants to play _chess_.  

“Charles,” he says, clearing his throat. “As much as I’m enjoying this social call –”

“Yes, you’re here on business,” Charles answers. “I know. That wall…” He contemplates the board for a moment. “You’re here to fix it.”

“Yes, I am.” Erik fiddles with a pawn. “Would you happen to know how?”

“You’re not wearing the helmet.”

“I am not.” A sudden surge of uneasiness. “Can you still – is my mind open, here?”

“No,” Charles says simply. “You are safe – I cannot read your mind, and Miss Frost is wary enough of the walls that she won’t touch them.”

“Prove it.” It comes out more accusatory than he’d meant, a black knight poking Charles in the chest.

“You’ll have to trust me. It’s virtually impossible to prove...”

“Prove it.” The knight presses.

Charles sighs, and looks at him as though Erik were a particularly petulant child. Which he supposes he is being, at the moment.  “All right,” he says slowly, then leans forward. “If I had my way, you would have kissed me, earlier. In the doorway.”

The knight drops. “Touché,” he manages.

Charles sits back again. “I have no better means to prove anything. I have no control over what you feel now. Before, I was a car, steering towards or away from thoughts and feelings. Now, you’re in the car, so to speak, so you can’t be hit by it…your feelings now are all your own.”

“My feelings are all my own,” Erik repeats slowly.

 

Charles moves his remaining bishop. “Checkmate.”

 

 

xv.

 

“I never understood,” Erik says slowly, watching the sway of Charles’ hips as he saunters from the chessboard.

Charles silently offers him a crystal tumbler (the decadence – ). “Understood what?”

“Your penchant for passivity.” The glass is like a live flame in Charles’ hands, like a diamond woman in the sunless desert of the edge.

“Not passivity, Erik,” Charles says. “But peace. And surely, a penchant for peace is understandable for someone who has seen so much of conflict.”

The clink of the glasses in a silent acknowledgement – without a word, they both know they are drinking to the history written in this ritual. “Even here, the liquor is excellent.”

“Don’t you understand?”

The crystal is pressing into his palm, leaving indents in the skin. “I cannot understand. You’ve seen the hive-mind of humanity, you’ve seen all the hatred they bear for all those who are different. Look at how they treat their own kind, enslaving…” The amber liquid begins to boil in the glass.

“I’ve seen the _minds_ of humanity,” Charles corrects gently. “And for every bigot there is a bright corner of tolerance. For every murderer, there is an innocent. It’s not all bad.”

Erik scowls at him. “Still think they’re all like Moira? After she tried to kill me? After the bullet - ?”

“Shaw was a mutant,” he points out. “And so are you.”

At that reminder, the glass shatters, spraying splinters of beauty in all directions.

 

Glass makes the sound of breaking and metal makes the sounds of war.

 

“Just take a deep breath and clear it,” Charles murmurs. Erik stares at him, shards of glass embedded in his palm. “Clear your mind of guilt, of anger. Let it go, and the glass will disappear also.”

The blood trickles down his hand, rich and thick.

“Erik, you’ve suffered great pain at the hands of men, human and mutant, but you cannot be ruled by rage – ”

“Enough of your pseudo-wisdom!” The shards fly towards Charles, just short of his quivering eyes, the unmarked line of his throat. “Always, these grandiose proclamations of forgiveness. That rage is all I have left; it’s how I survive. There is no other way – you can’t predict the future, and you can’t bet it against delusional naïveté. You never know what’s going to happen in the next hour, the next minute, the next second!” In the distance, there’s a gunshot bang and the sound of a body hitting the floor.

“Indeed, my friend,” Charles says slowly, and Erik wants to scream. “I know that better than anyone.”

 

In the distance, there’s a gunshot bang and the sound of a body hitting the floor.

 

“Would you like to see me as I really am?”


	2. Zwei

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is another Charles in front of the mirror, wheelchair-bound, pale, sickly, as though he’s been pickled in the juices of loneliness until his entire body is sour with it.

xvi.

 

 

“What do you mean, as you really - ?”

“This…” Charles waves a hand at his body as he stands slowly, the pieces of glass evaporating in front of him. “This has all been an illusion. A dream.”

“You said you can’t change my mind – ”

“But I can change mine.” Charles stands away from the chessboard, closing his eyes and breathing slowly. “This is my true form.”

And Erik stands, wary, half-expecting fangs and fur and feral snarling to erupt from Charles’ calm face as it had from Hank’s, ridges and reptilian tongue to curl from those lips for which he’d be forever damned.

Instead, silver metal and black shapes pool in a nebulous heap beneath Charles slowly, as he shrinks into the mass, it twists-twines together like a writhing snake in a garden of perfection, and, with a small popping noise, it is finally solid, more terrifying than any beast. The light ripples slowly over the image.

“A wheelchair,” Erik whispers. “Charles, I – the bullet that hit you, then – ” He is lost for words. Charles – _his_ Charles – can no longer walk or run or stumble or lean – is trapped to a near-coffin of steel forever.

“A wheelchair,” Charles agrees. “A rather good one, too – sturdy, light. Hank designed it. It’s quite excellent.”

“Excellent?” All the metal in the room sings with violence. “ _Excellent_?”  

“Yes. Excellent. The only thing that’s a bit tricky is the stairs, but we had an elevator installed. So I actually hadn’t seen this room in quite some time before…two months ago, perhaps. The chessboard had been cleared away.”

 “I can’t believe you. You’re all right with this. An elevator. A goddamn fucking elevator.”

Charles smiles darkly. “I wasn’t always all right, my friend,” he says. “Why do you think you’re here?”

 

xvii.

 

“To fix the wall,” Erik says, throat gone tight and dry. “The wall in your mind…the pain everyone else could feel – ”

Charles shrugs and toys with a stray thread on the sleeve of his cardigan. “Perhaps my own, perhaps the breaking of the wall itself – I cannot be sure. It would require external examination, which is, of course, out of the question. I suppose I’ve been comatose for the past…week? It’s hard to tell time here.”

Erik nods.  He feels numb, like his entire body is an elbow that’s been banged too hard on a countertop. Numb and tingling with pain. “And that wall was to keep all of it…all of it shut away.”

“Not necessarily consciously…erected,” Charles says, a coyness turning his mouth. The man had time for sexual innuendo, of all things.

“ _Really_ , Charles – ”

And then Charles laughs, a brilliant bright thing fuller and richer than Erik’s blood ever could be. “I apologize. There are other more pressing matters at hand.” He looks at Erik, but his eyes are glazed with other thoughts. “See, the trouble is that I don’t quite know how to fix it myself. The solution is not, of course, to erase all the feelings themselves.”

Erik remembers Mystique curled in a tight ball, clutching her head on a cold stone floor, sobbing as he watched – ‘It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault.’ “ _Can’t_ we erase the feelings?”

“You can erase memories, people, entire limbs, but emotions are the constant in all human brains. Those are building blocks, cornerstones, if you will, that can never be fully eliminated. And it would be foolhardy to try, particularly from within my own mind.”

“Isn’t there a way to…put them somewhere else? Perhaps create something more discreet than a wall, like a toilet, perhaps, and flush them – ”

Charles laughs again. “Ingenious. But Emma Frost will not be rummaging in my mind again, I can assure you.”

There it is, the needle insistently pricking at Erik’s skin again at the newfound hardness to Charles’ tone. He’d never thought that loss of innocence could hurt like giving birth.

“No, we need to find a way to wash them out, so to speak, but it would be too difficult to find a willing vessel – they need to be diluted by sunlight.”

“How…?”

“Oh, someone just has to unearth them, and see them, I think. Just as sharing that memory of Hannukah with me brightened your mind, so viewing the dark parts will brighten mine.”

Erik is hesitant. “Won’t it amplify the feelings, make them worse?”

“Misery loves company,” Charles drawls, and the needle is back, rare, exquisite. Erik lets it bleed him for a time, then it hits the floor with a solitary noise.

“Let me see the memories,” he says.

“What?”

“Let me see the memories,” Erik repeats. “Let me – dilute them for you.”

“No.”

“Is it because you don’t trust me?” he asks bluntly.

“No,” Charles’ reply is mild. “It’s because _you_ don’t trust me.”

His voice reloads with new anger, cock and click of the safety. “What does that mean?”

“If the whole time you’re thinking that I’m fabricating – that it’s just a ploy for pity, or…” His hands are tight on the armrests of his chair, his bones manacles for a pretty prison. “If you thought less of me, for feeling…this weakness…”

“I could never think less of you,” Erik says, voice catching on the idea.

“Are you sure? Please believe me when I say it’s all true, but I am also – I am also ashamed, I must admit.” He lets out a weary smile and sigh. “You’re in the middle of the muddle that is my mind,” he says. “I may as well ask for the truth. Do you not already think less of me for this chair?”

Erik looks at him then. Charles’ face is still clear of lines, angled brow and full mouth, hands folded in his lap. His eyes are still an ocean distilled, exposed collarbone under the crisp shirt and cardigan still a tantalizing sight. He could be merely sitting down, enjoying a novel, or a new paper on genetics. Nothing is wrong. The idea is magnetic. Erik walks toward him, kneels at his feet, takes a calf in his hands – ignores the atrophy as best he can. “No, Charles. I do not.”

He starts at Charles’ hand on his cheek, gently turning his face up like a flower craning to meet the sun. “I must admit – to some reticent…” Charles takes a deep, stuttering breath. “But if you’re sure, so be it. Let it never be said that I stopped you from what you wanted.”

And Erik wants to protest but suddenly, they’re being sucked into a dark vortex, reduced to nothing then expanding again, and they’re back in Erik’s room.

 

xviii.

 

Erik and Charles linger in the doorway, watching a shadow of Charles (eyes duller, hands less finely wrought) maneuver jerkily about the room in the chair, throwing Erik’s possessions into a plastic bag. Pants, shirts, shoes, socks – underwear. Pens, scraps of paper (“checking on the Hank”, “will be back soon”). There is a discipline and economy in shadow-Charles’ movements, as though waiting will make him turn to stone, or perhaps to fire. Everything is thrown out, except for the briefcase, which was, indeed, forgotten, and shadow-Charles almost leaves, until he knocks a closet door open in his clumsiness, and the sleeve of Erik’s old leather jacket pokes out.

 Carefully, slowly, hands made of china magnolias and heart made of glass, shadow-Charles reaches out a hand to the soft sleeve, tugs it off the wire hanger, bent to fit the jacket exactly. It folds easily into his lap, and he brushes it delicately with his fingers. He is like God caressing the ridges of his most striking mountain range, peaks of scent and memory. He raises the jacket slowly, gathers it close to his chest and holds it there, as though gradually it would sink in and the two would become one skin; holds on hungrily with his mouth pressed into the collar.

Erik can barely breathe for the asphyxia of desperation.

A knock on the door, and shadow-Charles throws the jacket onto the bed just as Sean peeks in. “Professor?”

“Yes?” In his flustered state, shadow-Charles doesn’t even bother to correct him. (“Call me Charles”).

“You’re needed downstairs. Beast and Alex are throwing things at each other again.”

With a resigned sigh and smile, shadow-Charles wheels out of the room, sparing the barest flick of an eye back to the crumpled shape of the jacket on the bed.

Charles tugs Erik along, and they follow back out the door. “I daresay you’re familiar with this hallway,” Charles says wryly.

“You knew I was here?”

“One does tend to notice if there’s a presence treading the pathways of your mind. Besides, it…it was a presence I hadn’t felt in a while.”

Erik says nothing, still caught in the whirlwind of emotion. How shadow-Charles had _held_ that jacket –

“The worst part about seeing that again,” Charles says conversationally, “is that last moment, when your jacket’s on the bed like that. It’s as though you had come back in a hurry, and were perhaps checking on the children’s training, or had just gone to the kitchen, or – ”

“Charles, I…”

“Shh. It cannot be undone.”

Erik’s mind mutinies – yes, it can, you were standing just five minutes ago, why don’t you change your own –

 “We need to go that way.” Charles points in the direction from which Erik had come. “If you would be so kind as to push me?”

 

 

xix.

 

Gently, he pushes the door open, and Erik is confronted with the familiar sight of Charles as a young boy, nestled under the heap of covers. “If only I had someone to do what you did earlier, Erik,” Charles says, watching as Charles-the-boy sobs on and on. “Someone to hold me, and listen, and say it was all right. Even once.”

“Didn’t your mother ever – ”

“Did I never tell you how I met Raven?” Charles asks pleasantly, and Erik cannot believe the non-sequitur against the backdrop of harsh crying. “I felt a presence in the kitchen, and went downstairs to investigate. It was my mother, digging in the fridge.” He laughs. “What a strange sight! My mother, in the kitchen. But I really knew it wasn’t my mother when she offered to make me a hot chocolate. Raven had been watching the house, and had automatically assumed…”

Erik moves impatiently, turning Charles toward him. “Is that why Raven was babbling?”

“When, of all possible occasions?”

“‘A hardship softened by me’,” he mimics cruelly. “Why didn’t you tell me, Charles, why didn’t you – ”

Charles-the-boy cries on and on, gasping and despairing and nearly empty.

“I didn’t think it was important.”

Erik snarls at him: “You saw my worst, my darkest, my brightest – you saw my mother, you saw everything, and yet did not feel it was _important_ to tell me anything, anything about yourself – ”

“I was wrong,” Charles says simply. “I’m sorry.”

 “This is why I wear the helmet,” Erik snaps.

There is suddenly a sword of unbelievable proportions running Charles through, blood splattering, guts flying, and no matter how Erik shouts and tugs with his powers and his hands it won’t be moved.

“Just a moment.” Charles closes his eyes and breathes as deeply as possible, and it dissolves. All the blood leaves. The hole is gone.   

“So alone,” Charles-the-boy whimpers in both their minds.

Erik reaches a hand out to the boy, as unthinkingly as before, and says, very deliberately: “You are not alone.”

 

xx.

 

The next room is empty when Charles and Erik enter, but “Soon,” Charles promises.

Sure enough, there is a bang on the door, and then a different Charles and Erik are stumbling in, bright as candle flames in the dimness of the room. They’re entwined so tightly, a flurry of hands and the wet press of mouth. “You – ” bright-Erik says.

“Me,” bright-Charles giggles, moving his hands under the turtleneck to find skin.

“I could never...” bright-Erik pushes bright-Charles onto the bed, and continues to attack his body, his clothes, pulling buttons, tearing cloth in his hastiness.

“I liked that shirt,” Charles remarks mildly, and Erik laughs. They’re watching their own most intimate moments. There is nothing to be had but frank distance.

“You make me feel so – light,” bright-Charles mumbles against bright-Erik’s lips. “Or maybe it’s just the whiskey – ”

Erik flinches, knowing what comes next.

“One day, you will fly,” bright-Erik says, nuzzling bright-Charles’ throat. “I will make you metal wings and you’ll soar, like a spirit, an iron bird – you’re going to fly so high, and Sean will be so jealous – ”

And bright-Charles giggles, light-headed with empty promises, stroking bright-Erik’s hair.

“You will fly, _mein Liebling_.” A kiss pressed to that tantalizing exposed collarbone, bright-Charles’ shirt open and gaping, and bright-Erik unbuttons the pants, moves his hand, moves his head –

Erik turns to look at Charles, whose posture betrays nothing. “Do we have to stay?” he asks quietly.

“We both know how this ends,” Charles whispers back, smiling, as though their past can hear them. “But there’s something I want to show you.”

Bright-Charles is moaning and arching on the bed, lewd, wanton.  \

“Something I haven’t seen before?” Erik raises an eyebrow, and with a particularly creative expletive from bright-Erik on the bed, he realizes that maybe they’re _flirting_ , of all things.

“Something you _have_ seen before.” Charles squints and cranes his neck. “Soon. Soon.”

Sweat. Heat. Exertion exhalation exclamation.  

“Now,” Charles says.

“Tie me up,” bright-Charles pants.

“Charles, I can’t – I can’t do that.”

“Please do it, I want you – ”

“Charles.” The quiet noise of skin unsticking, a pleading sigh.

“Think about how I would look,” bright-Charles shoots into the darkness. “My wrists tied to the bed, everything exposed, laid out to be done with as you like, all _for you –_ ”

“Shut up – ”

“Please – ”

“I can’t – ”

“Please – ”

Erik is sitting stone-still as the scene replays, remembering.

Split second –

Then a sudden crack – a thin rod breaks free from the curtain rail, and white wrists are straining against a mahogany headboard. They look like Venus’ lost arms, seconds from being snapped off.

“Mine,” bright-Erik says, and is drawn to the jugular.

“We can leave now, if you would like,” Charles says.

They exit the room to the sounds of enthusiastic and muffled fucking.   

“Did you?” Erik asks, once the door closes behind them.

“No, Erik. I did not.” Charles puts out a hand and stops Erik in his tracks. “It is very important that you know that I kept my promise, and did _not_.”

“But it’s – it was so against what I believed, and then suddenly I wanted it, so much...how _else_ could my desires have aligned with yours so suddenly, if you didn’t…?  It was so abrupt…I never – I never…” He loses his nerve, courage failing, as it often does with Charles.

He’d forgotten that as often as his courage failed, it was always painstakingly picked up again. Charles takes his hand in both of his own, and smiles, so open. “You never?” he prompts.

“I never wanted to hurt you,” Erik mumbles, voice like old broken asphalt (crumbling with life’s steps), avoiding the glint of the wheelchair in the light of the hallway. “I never wanted to hurt you, Charles.”

“The wrist bindings didn’t hurt me,” Charles says, rubbing a soothing circle into the back of Erik’s hand. “It was the look you gave me afterward, where you – where you wondered.”

Erik sighs, rubs a hand over his eyes. “Could you blame me?”

“No,” Charles concedes. “No, I couldn’t. I can’t.”

 

 

xxi.

 

 “Ah, this room,” Charles says, voice unreadable, hand pausing before the door. “We’re getting closer.”

“Can you feel the dark space being filled with light?” Erik asks. Sarcasm coats his concern like the tang of kerosene over books.

“I don’t know,” Charles answers. “We can only know once we’ve retreated away from the dark space.”

“These memories are clustered there?”

Charles looks at his feet. “It was very brave of you to walk though that hole in the fabric of my mind, my friend.”

“You’re getting very good at that,” Erik says, scowling.

“What?”

“Actively not answering the question that was asked.”

“Am I?” Charles retorts.

“Child,” Erik mutters, and does not miss the quirk of the corner of Charles’ mouth as he pushes the door open.

There is another Charles in front of the mirror, wheelchair-bound, pale, sickly, as though he’s been pickled in the juices of loneliness until his entire body is sour with it. The light is still like vinegar, filling out sick-Charles’ hollow-skull eyes and slack mouth.

Erik and Charles watch silently as sick-Charles moves. He opens the cabinet door, toothbrush in hand. The mirror swings open, and he starts to reach – but it’s too high. The tube of toothpaste, which would have been thoughtlessly accessible to a standing Charles, is impossibly out of reach for sick-Charles and his wheelchair.

He sighs and stares at his toothbrush – cherry red – as though it might give him an answer. “Even this,” he murmurs. “Cleaning my teeth.” He glances up at the toothpaste, and his hand twitches on the armrest of the wheelchair. Slowly, furtively, _shamefully_ , he reaches a hand up – hopeless, he knows, but animals are curious beings.    

But of course he can’t reach it. But of course it’s futile.

It’s a beautiful thing, the tempest that brews under sick-Charles’ skin, and the way he swallows it down like bitter fruit. He can feel the anger radiating off of sick-Charles, almost like sex, it’s glorious. Now, surely after this ordeal, Charles _must_ understand anger – those hurricane swirls of helplessness like ancient Maori tattoos, burned deep into his core.

Sick-Charles closes his eyes briefly. Erik knows that he is making the decision – to call, to reach out with a loud thought for help, or not to call? He knows where Charles’ pride will swerve him next. He knows the mirror ends up broken.

He knows, but it is still a shock when it happens – faster than a bullet, sick-Charles’ eyes spring open; his fist jumps forward and makes contact with the mirror. For a split second, it is silent. Then comes the noise of shattered glass, a waterfall of impulse, dissonant crashes as sick-Charles’ face falls away, bloody shard by bloody shard. He’s watching the syncopated arrhythmia of the mirror disintegrating quickly, a maestro with no control over the violence of his orchestra’s symphony. His hand is littered with glass, not so much a poppy-field as a minefield of memories, and sick-Charles gingerly plucks these fragments of explosive reflection from the ground of skin, losing his legs every time.

Glass still silvers in the sink. “I had everything,” sick-Charles bites out, a human voice out of place in the cacophony of silence and mirrors. “And one goddamn – one _fucking_ –”

It’s strange to hear those words coming out of sick-Charles’ mouth, here and now. Hardly the most obscene thing Erik has heard from him (the wet slurp of his mouth on Erik’s dick, “yes, fuck me, please”, “they’re just following orders.”) – but usually Charles kept it all in a small box, for him to rue later. The venom behind the words renders the words themselves innocent and clean. It seeps like temptation and that bitter fruit of knowledge, deep into Erik’s bones, black dark marrow rich and dense with the guts of larvae and family and other broken things.

Erik knows this venom well. To see it so etched on sick-Charles’ face like a lithograph print – backwards, mirror-image – is unsettling.

“Professor? Are you all right?” Hank lumbers into the bathroom, going through Erik and Charles. He’s still almost bluer than the bathroom. “I heard a crash – ” The other three pairs of eyes see him see the mirror, the blood, the diamond clinging to sick-Charles’ hand. “I heard a crash,” he repeats, feebly filling the vacuum.  

“Just a small accident. If you could fetch the first-aid kit, however, I would be most grateful,” sick-Charles says. Pleasant. Poised, posed. Hank nods numbly and leaves. Sick-Charles looks straight up at the crumbling mirror, and for a moment, he makes direct, stunning eye contact with Erik. You see. You see what you have done to me. Then, slowly, he pushes himself painfully out of the room, wheels crunching over the glass.

 

 

xxii.

 

“That was something,” Erik remarks as coolly as possible when the door closes behind them. He can almost feel sick-Charles ghosting through them still, and he’s shivering in time to the crashes of broken glass.

“It was,” Charles agrees. “It was a taste of loss of control. Quite tantalizing, I must say.” He eyes Erik. “A different sort of loss of control than I was used to, before.”

“When…when was this?” He struggles to keep his voice even.  

“About a year ago. Back from the hospital, still disbelieving.” Charles shrugs as though flicking off a fly. “Illusions disappeared quite quickly.”

“I can’t” – the façade of a glacier cracks – “how could you…?”

“Erik.” Charles reaches to him, where he’s already standing behind the wheelchair in order to hide. “Erik.”

A breath. “Yes, Charles?”

“You don’t have to worry about…about me. Express how you feel about the memories. I know it doesn’t come naturally to you,” Charles says, almost laughing. “But I will ask you to try. Sometimes I think…I wonder if…”

They both wait patiently for the next words.

“I wonder if I had expressed to you fully how your memories made me feel – would they have been better taken-care of?” He looks up at the high ceiling of the corridor. It’s nearly black with the low light. Words flow out in a rush, Charles’ accent tripping over syllables and spaces. “I told you that memory was beautiful, but I never fully – we didn’t have time later that day for me to _really_ _tell_ _you_. How much it changed me, feeling that much love and tradition and acceptance, and oh, Erik, to have lost them, to have lost your mother…it just made everything all the clearer – ”

Erik’s mouth is a tightrope, Charles’ ramblings dancing across precariously. He doesn’t even want to think about that memory now, doesn’t want to –

Charles breathes deeply, and calm drifts back to his own voice. “It made it clear that Shaw had to die.”

“I always thought it was…you, the pacifist, holding him in place even as I put that helmet on,” Erik says. It would be much easier to have this conversation if he didn’t have to worry about composure. As it is his joints are rigid with restraint and his tongue moves only when he forces the gears to shift. If only he could –

“I – I don’t know. All I could think of was the gun and the coin, and…it hurt. It hurt so much. I still get” – Charles waves a hand around vaguely, the set of his jaw betraying the nonchalance. – “thoughts about it. Sometimes.”

“You get nightmares.” Silence. “There are no nerve endings in the brain,” Erik says mulishly. “You can’t feel pain.”

“Freezing a person…you’re embedded very deeply in their mind. Very deeply.” Charles smiles sadly despite Erik’s callousness, and it nearly unlocks the mechanism in his larynx, those wheels and coal furnaces that stifle every vibration that wants to cry out and weep. “All of him. Sadness, anger…love, regrets.”

Erik’s lip begins to curl at the idea that Shaw could have emotions, but then Charles says: “But his mind looked like a prison. He never regretted what he did to you. No remorse whatsoever. So, naturally, he had to die. It was as much for you as it was for me, Erik,” he continues quickly. “Although now, I’m stuck with remnants…occasionally I want to do some very uncharacteristic things. Start World War Three. Kill all the humans. Have sex with Emma Frost.” An abrupt bark of laughter.

There is nothing to say. “I see.”

“It made me think that perhaps you had a bit of Shaw left in you, as well.” Erik starts in shock. He’s gone at Charles before he knows it, turning the chair to face him, (fingers itching for flesh), but he has been well-anticipated: “In another sense, of course. Entirely different. You…you aren’t a murderer, Erik.”

 _But I wanted to kill you_. “I hate – ” There’s a crease in Charles’ trousers from where his legs have been resting. It’s uncharacteristic and the shadow cast by it is long and steady.

“I hate – ”

Charles has never worn metal anywhere – no eyelets, no cufflinks, no hidden religious symbols, no capped cavities even – his stainless steel now is all inside him and it is his throne.

“I hate – ”

Pause.

“ – how he makes me into an animal,” Erik finally finishes, honesty blindsiding him with a heavy punch. The curl of Charles’ fingers over his (itch, settled). “I hate how he – he _forged_  me from the raw thing I was, I am _this shape_ because of everything he did, and he – I can’t move on from what he did, even though he’s dead, he still ruins me – ”

“You are the lovely shape you are,” Charles is nearly cooing, sweetly pulling him down to kneel, “because of genetics. Evolution crafted you this way. The subtle magic of biology. Chromosomes wound so tightly from alleles and bases and ribose, all expressed in fantastic phenotypes.” His hand is gentling away any roughness at Erik’s brow like a mother’s hand, blurring lines, splashing water over furnaces. “This,” he says, fingers lighting on Erik’s cheekbone. “Perhaps from a great-grandfather, from your mother’s father’s father. This” – hand over fluttering eyelid – “maybe from your grandmother, the same eyes, your father could always see his mother in them. Your skin, your height – both traits acquired through polygenic inheritance, the gene pool mixing to create a particularly unique blend.”

Erik puts a hand to Charles’ wrist. Not to still or stop him, but to perpetuate the fantasy, to create a circle of touch. It’s warm and familiar.

“Your genes separate you from being a banana or a shark by actually a very small percentage,” Charles says. “But what a remarkable percentage it is! It gives us the capacity to have this conversation. I can’t,” and he’s sheepish, like he’s admitting a deficiency, “communicate with the minds of animals.”

“Or bananas,” Erik mutters against his palm. A soft chuckle by his ear.

There is a still moment, captured in low light and the glint of metal from both ends like an insect caught in amber.

“You are all the pieces of your family,” Charles says softly. “It’s most certainly not your fault your family was torn to pieces.”

There are pieces of Shaw stuck in Erik like fragments of ore scattered in a rock but he smiles – fully – at Charles, stands up and begins to push the chair towards the next door, which, with a deep breath, they open.

 

 

xxiii.

 

It’s a simple bedroom. Spare. Clean. Four o’clock sun is shining clearly. The bed is rather lower than an average bed, and there are curved grooves in the floor. There is nothing on the hangers in the open closet, everything’s folded in a small cabinet by the sliding glass doors. A soft wind carries the muslin curtains – the first sound – a fluttering like the hiss of feathers as a bird takes frightened flight.

“Oh,” Charles says, a sound like a startled cricket.

“Are we in the wrong place?”

“No. Yes. Perhaps.”

“Which will it be?” Erik asks, a smile still lingering on his mouth.

“A decisive maybe,” Charles says seriously. His hands are twisting in his lap. “Oh, Erik.” Weary, worldly, wavering, more so than before, more often than before, this lamentation emerges forth. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“This memory is one that I never wanted to show you,” he says. “If I may be honest.”

“It’s your choice.”

“You promise not to think less of me?” Charles says, and his voice is like a child’s, cloying juice sliding clinging to the insides of a glass.

“I wouldn’t…I _won’t…_ ” Erik corrects himself.

Charles looks at him – looks at the planes of his face that he’d felt and given names to (recessive, dominant, nucleotide) and steels his own mouth. “Towards the window.”

Slowly, wheels creaking over the floor, they make their way to the fluttering curtains and the patch of light.

There’s another Charles on the balcony, nearly at the rail. He’s looking out at the grounds – flat green until the dark tangle of trees on the edge, the sky an open tin above them. It’s peaceful and calm – almost too calm. Empty. Everything is still.

Even empty-Charles’ hands are still, for once. Charles always fidgets – straightening a collar or doing up a button, hands in his pockets in his belt at his mouth at his temple in his lap like writhing eels. There’s the trill of birdsong somewhere in the background, and Erik thinks it absurd that the bird should find it appropriate to disturb the quiet. Instinctively, empty-Charles looks round for the animal, and his eyes catch like a hangnail in pantyhose when he looks in the doorway and sees them. Charles and empty-Charles stare at each other for a moment like two sides of the same coin. Erik stands, his hand mindlessly on Charles’ shoulder until empty-Charles looks away with his empty eyes and begins to laugh.

The broken sound is far more of a blasphemy to silence with its ragged gasping, the way hoarseness holds on to every rasp of sound. Utterly humorless, utterly black. Empty-Charles is looking down and his shoulders are shaking with it.

 

IMAGINE.

 

The word is spelled out in Erik’s mind in the way only Charles’ thoughts can be, solid, heavy, real, until he’s saying the words himself.

 

IMAGINE IF

 

It’s a lance or an arrow, the pointed edge of a spade unearthing maggots and discomfort from underneath his skin, bordering on pain, like the pain at the edge. There are so many ways that sentence can end:

 

IMAGINE IF -

 

He takes his hand back from Charles’ shoulder like the cardigan is scalding him. Things full of promise always make him shudder like the nervous pulse of a quail or the sudden retreat of a snail, draw away from the world. Imagination was one of those things – Shaw had always told him, “Beyond wildest dreams – ” but it wasn’t a dream, was it. It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare he’d passed on to Charles, and now empty-Charles is looking over the rail like it could save him. There’s something impenetrable about his expression, like dark lacquer, and his spine is spiralling into itself, his skin wants to crawl inside out and away, and empty-Charles is nothing but a chair holding a mind.

Erik expects to feel blinding pain – screaming – but he feels nothing. A radiating numbness, and that, perhaps, is the worst thing.

Four o’clock sun is shining clearly. The flutter of the muslin curtains like a rat’s heart as the poison spreads, empty-Charles filling the space inside and around him with a gallivanting imagination that delights in torment. Imagine if – imagine if – imagine if – hopes connected with unspoken thoughts like a bizarre daisy chain.

Charles has always been optimistic, and it’s surprising that the imagination was draining rather than fuelling him. The irony is that even as a telepath he can’t control his own mind. Daisies are nothing but weeds choking a garden. Empty-Charles rolls closer to the rail of the balcony, solid stone, with no regard for the flower pots he sends tumbling and crashing. Closer, closer, soil spilling and muting the breaking of porcelain underneath the metal of the wheelchair.

Finally, he’s at the edge.

Delicately, one hand on each side of him, braced against the stone of the balcony rail. They’re like organic white vines splayed to keep him here. Erik can see the flex of his muscles underneath the suit, pushing up – for a moment, thinks that all empty-Charles wants is to stand up.

He forgets that empty-Charles is at the edge.

In slow motion, he reads intent, sees the set of Charles’ mouth, the grip of his hands on the rail – surges forward even though he knows there’s nothing he can do, empty-Charles can’t even see him –

Empty-Charles collapses, panting, into the wheelchair. Erik’s hands are merely paperclips away from him. They’re both breathing, heavily, so heavily.     

There’s a dark swirl again, a tornado, their bodies are swept up, and this time, they’re deposited in the room where they used to play chess.  


End file.
